elijahrossben@gmail.com /
LA Knight: WWE Entrance
Role: Team Lead, Designer, & Particle Dude
Ideated & led the team for LA Knight, Created Particle System for LA Knight
With a deadline only 8.5 weeks away from our start date, a group of 22 people divided and conquered the task of creating three vastly different environments inside Unreal Engine for the WWE wrestlers; LA Knight, Alexa Bliss, and Bayley.
In this massive design sprint, our entire team also flew out to Detroit to do some on-site research at a WWE Smackdown event and get a better understanding of the technology in use every night.
At the start of the project, we divided into smaller groups to perform extensive research on assigned wrestlers. Looking over their available merchandising, WWE entrances, and any other information available on our wrestlers, our teams went straight to work creating nearly 40 concepts to share with our first round of designs.
My original concept for LA Knight was ultimately selected from the initial design round and developed through all 5 rounds of concepting. This idea ended up being in the final deliverable to the WWE team and has since been on-air! The initial sketch can be seen above, along with two mood boards that were put together through various stages of the creative development.
Inspired by his name, the LA Knight concept captured the essence of Los Angeles and pulled creative inspiration from the Wrestler's motion visuals from their LED Screen entrance video. With neon yellow and blue poles shooting out from the center of the screen, the idea was to have a neon city with a distinct 80s synth-wave aesthetic. Envisioned with the city's silhouette, there would be vibrant palm trees, brightly lit poles, and a low-poly ground to complement the dynamic atmosphere of particles flying through the air.
What was temporarily split into two concepts to best understand what the WWE team was looking for, we merged what worked best between both concepts and split our group into roles to begin asset development. We had our bases covered as we had individual members handling each step of the process, modeling, texturing & configuring shaders, particle artists, and a general unreal lead tech artist all compiling assets around the clock to achieve our desired result, seen below.
LA Knight Team:
Darlon - Lead Unreal Tech (Triggers & Shaders)
Braden - 3D Artist (Ground Geo & Palm Trees Animation)
Cole - 3D Artist (Palm Trees)
Hyein - 2D/3D Artist, Producer (Building Sprites, Concepting)
Ethan - 3D Artist (Textures & Shaders)
Elijah - 2D/3D Artist, Producer (Team Lead, Concepting, Particles)
Hyein - 2D Artist (Concepting)
Suzaan - Producer (Experience Team Lead)